Skip to content

3 Comments

  1. Psych Gripes: Introduction and Overview – WordPlay
    July 4, 2025 @ 4:07 pm

    […] PG 1: Two Biggies — insufficient differentiation; and my first go at rationalism and mind–body dualism […]

  2. Peter Saint-Andre
    July 5, 2025 @ 5:40 pm

    I’ll need to think about this post before replying further. However, it’s my understanding that at least some psychologists have worked hard to overcome mind-body dualism. Our old friend J.J. Gibson might be one, in the sense that he and his wife Eleanor looked at how animals live in and interact with their surroundings. Another intriguing line of thought is what’s called embodied cognition, for instance in Anthony Chemero’s book Radical Embodied Cognitive Science (which I have not yet read). I’m sure there are others, but I’m not familiar with the relevant scientific literature.

  3. Jackie
    July 6, 2025 @ 7:16 am

    The Gibsons did indeed reject dualism. Depending on what year one considers the start of psychology as a science, that came 80–100 years later. If intro psych textbooks are a good judge of their influence, not much has changed as a result. James’ ecological theory is rarely cited. Eleanor’s famous visual cliff experiments get more attention; it isn’t uncommon for them to be explained in terms of information-processing (IP) theory though.

    True embodied psychology can be (and should be) viewed as a logical extension of the Gibsons’ work, yet it too is often presented using IP terminology. That approach still dominates psychology, and it comes directly from Descartes’ ideas. That is my primary point in this post: as a field, psychology hasn’t rejected fundamental assumptions that severely limit its usefulness.

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.